Oh dear, I've come over all middle-class again. It keeps happening to me. It might be due to my age (39), or my possession of a child about to enter into the school system. It's definitely something to do with the slightly righteous tones adopted by Brownite ministers and their acolytes about our duty to the underprivileged. Something even made me swell with pride to see the Queen and all her pomp in the House of Lords yesterday, and think what a fine country we live in. Even though, intellectually, it really annoys me that she's sitting there.

It's a head and a heart thing, this middle classness. Intellectually, for instance, it pleases me that the Government is focusing so hard on the poorest families, on the country's unhealthiest adults and its lowest-achieving children. When I hear Gordon Brown promise a new unit to tackle child poverty, I think: great. When I hear of new school buildings in inner-city areas I think: great. And when I heard the Government announce this week that it would make education or training compulsory for 16 and 17-year-olds, I thought, yup, great.

Radio 4 listeners were fulminating as though this were some historic attack on liberty, but I fail to see how forcing a teenager who will otherwise end up long-term unemployed and unemployable to gain decent skills is such an infringement of his rights. I expect there were people who protested at the infringement on the rights of five-year-olds to earn a decent wage climbing chimneys, or “do nothing”, when compulsory schooling was introduced in the 19th century. It took 25 years for the leaving age to be raised from 11 to 12 and then 14, another 29 years to get it to 15, a further 25 to get it to 16 in 1972, and it will be 43 years since then when it finally hits 18.

Life expectancy (and working age) has climbed with the leaving age. When it was 14, for instance, life expectancy was around 60, and lower for women; today it is 75-80. With that in mind, another couple of years at school doesn't sound so hard after all, does it? As long as - and it's a big “as long as” - the training or schooling is worthwhile to that teenager, and disruptive kids are not forced to stay in academic settings to disrupt them for everyone else for another two years.

So, intellectually, you see, I thought, yup, good policy. Hope it helps them. “Them.” Because we middle classes generally stay at school anyway.

Then I read that this week the Government ordered a review of school appeal panels, concerned that middle-class families are using the system more effectively than others. In other words, they are using the system to fight harder for the best school places. And my head thought, yup, okayyyy, I suppose that is unfair, because the wealthier families probably have access to better legal advice, for instance, or more time to pore over the regulations and the minutiae of the grounds for appeal, so they get it right more often.

And only a little bit of me, that eeny weeny heart bit, the one that suddenly and embarrassingly swelled with pride at the Queen, felt: but why penalise us for learning to use the system? It's an embarrassing feeling for us middle classes, this “why penalise us?” one. Closely related to the equally uncomfortable “what about me?”, it comes from the heart and not the head and it can arise at any time. We know it's selfish, we know it's probably narrow-minded and, in Brownite Britain, just not right, and we send it packing sharpish, but that doesn't stop it returning.

It's education that seems to set it off, and that's the most invidious of all because, while the middle-class mum might not have a choice whether to fund tax breaks for the poor, she often does have a choice about whether to opt out of the state school system and add her little bit to divided Britain. The brochure from Perky Private School for Girls (husband sent off for it, just out of interest) twinkles in the corner.

Yet the Government still makes no “offer” to middle-class parents keen to see local school improvements and prepared to give head and heart (and time) to fight for them. The Blairite idea that parents should be able to open new schools where they can prove a need doesn't seem to have made it across from the old Department for Education to the new Department for Children, Schools and Families; I expect someone has been told to sit on it and squash it to death. And the city academies scheme of building expensive new schools, now brought back firmly under local authority control, is aimed four-square at underachieving children in deprived areas. “It doesn't exist to provide quasi-independent schools for the middle classes,” as one of the Prime Minister's close colleagues - educated at a real, not a quasi, independent school - put it to me caustically last week.

The head goes: good, raising standards in the toughest areas is a noble ambition. While the heart goes: mmm... we've been fighting for a new building, in our barely bog-standard local comprehensive. Needn't cost anything like £50 million; any chance we could bid for just a bit of that? Or have you got something else for us?

Ah, yes: extra English lessons and a teacher trained in dyslexia awareness. No parent who has traipsed around state schools can have failed to be impressed by the emphasis on special needs provision, and on extra lessons for those whose first language is Urdu or whatever (head - that's really good, really really good; heart - what about me?).

“Gifted and talented” programmes? Official aim: “To improve gifted and talented pupils' outcomes, particularly for the most disadvantaged”. Way it actually operates: “It was all the middle-class kids, the criteria used to select us wasn't quite clear,” as one recent participant put it to me yesterday. “And it reassured my mother.” Well they'll be cracking down on that.

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